The Pat Conroy Cookbook (24 page)
Read The Pat Conroy Cookbook Online
Authors: Pat Conroy
BLACK PEPPER AND PEAR TARTE TATIN
•
SERVES 8
1 recipe Pie Dough (page 7); you will end up using only about three-quarters of the dough
6 Bartlett or Bosc pears (about 3 pounds)
Juice of 1 lemon, strained
8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter
½ cup sugar
1 vanilla bean, split lengthwise, seeds scraped out and saved
½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
2 tablespoons heavy cream
Use a copper tart pan or a 9-inch skillet with a nonstick surface and ovenproof handle
.
1. Preheat the oven to 400°F.
2. On a lightly floured surface, roll out one round of pastry slightly larger than the surface of the skillet, about 12 inches. Place the pastry round on a baking sheet and chill until needed.
3. Peel, core, and quarter the pears. Place in a large mixing bowl and toss with lemon juice.
4. In a nonstick skillet over medium-high heat, melt the butter and sugar, stirring frequently, until a golden caramel color. Stir in the vanilla bean scrapings and black pepper. Add the heavy cream and continue cooking and stirring for about 2 minutes. Tightly arrange the pears in the pan with their narrow points facing toward the center of the pan and 4 or 5 slices in the middle of the pan. (It is best to crowd the pears into the pan because as they release moisture, they will shrink.) Cover and cook until pears are translucent, about 20 minutes. Cool.
5. Gently lay the pastry over the pears. Tuck edges of pastry under the pears. (This does not have to be perfect: tarte Tatin is a rustic tart.) Refrigerate for 15 minutes. Transfer to the oven and bake until the pastry is golden and crisp, about 30 minutes.
6. Allow the tart to cool on a rack for 10 minutes. Place a serving platter (with a large enough diameter to extend at least 2 inches beyond the rim of the skillet) upside down over the skillet. Holding the platter firmly against the rim of the skillet, quickly flip the pan, gently easing the tart onto the platter. If some of the pears fall off the serving platter while being flipped, rearrange them on the pastry in the same pattern. Serve hot.
PEPPERY TEA
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MAKES 8 CUPS
4 teaspoons black tea leaves
One 2-inch piece ginger, peeled
1 small piece crystallized ginger
1 cinnamon stick
10 whole cloves
10 cardamom seeds
1 tablespoon whole black peppercorns
1 long strip orange zest
8 thin orange slices
1. Bring 9 cups cold water to a boil. As soon as the water comes to a boil, take the pot off the heat and add all the ingredients except the orange slices. Steep for 8 to 10 minutes.
2. Place an orange slice in the bottom of each cup and pour tea.
CAPICOLA
Buy a smoked pork butt (get a soft one that has a lot of fat in it) and remove the casing. Mix 1 cup salt (make sure it’s iodized) and ¼ cup red pepper flakes together, pressing the smoked pork butt in the mixture until all sides are well coated. Wrap the peppered pork butt in white paper towels and secure tightly with rubber bands. Refrigerate (the dampness from the meat will wet the spices and turn the paper towels slightly reddish) until the meat feels hard and the paper towels are dry, about 6 weeks
.
MADAGASCAR GREEN PEPPERCORN BUTTER
For each stick (8 tablespoons) of butter, you’ll need 1 tablespoon drained Madagascar green peppercorns (canned and preserved in brine), 1 tablespoon finely minced shallot, and 1 tablespoon finely minced fresh parsley. Soften the butter to room temperature. Mash the peppercorns with the back of a spoon. Fold the shallot and parsley into the butter. Refrigerate or freeze. Bring to room temperature before using on fish or meat
.
PARMIGIANO-REGGIANO CARPACCIO
The presentation of this dish is similar to carpaccio, with the taste balanced among the saltiness of the cheese, the sweetness of the olive oil, and the bite of the pepper. Using a cheese shaver, cut long, thin strips of Parmigiano-Reggiano by dragging the blade across the face of a wedge of cheese. Place the strips on a plate (plain white, if possible, so the cheese appears translucent), drizzle with olive oil, and sprinkle with lots of coarsely ground black pepper. Serve with toasted Tuscan bread on the side
.
I
n the late spring of 1979, I was coming to the end of my time in Paris, and I could feel
The Lords of Discipline
moving toward completion. I would walk the city at night paying homage to writers who had lived there before me. I paid homage to Proust at his grave in Père Lachaise Cemetery, tipping my hat to Héloïse and Abelard, and paid my dues to the excesses of my rock-and-roll generation by spending ten minutes at the grave of Jim Morrison of the Doors. I found the shop that had once housed Sylvia Beach’s famous bookstore, Shakespeare & Company, where every English-speaking writer in the world seemed to have landed, but where James Joyce would come for gossip, sustenance, pocket money, and the companionship of a woman who thought he was the greatest novelist on earth. I spent a morning at Victor Hugo’s house and walked past the hotel where Oscar Wilde had died and ate frequent dinners at Le Polidor, the cheap and unpretentious restaurant where every writer who passed through Paris had eaten dinner. Walking across the Luxembourg Gardens, I would stop at the doorway where Gertrude Stein and her companion, Alice B. Toklas, had kept an apartment, where Picasso and Matisse and Hemingway and Fitzgerald had come to pay homage.
Paris is a city of words and a secret city of words not written. Signs on buildings give away the names of unknown authors who once lived between those walls. You cannot take a step in Paris without walking on the footprints of a thousand artists and writers who have come before you. It excites every cell in your body; it unnerves you that you are adding your voice to the great simmering bouillon of all the writers who have come before you as the great city and time turn their blind careless eyes toward you. There, at the Deux Magots, Sartre sat with his hand on Simone de Beauvoir and his walleye lingering on an actress coming out of the powder room. Baudelaire got drunk in that tavern and Jean Cocteau ate a dozen oysters at the window of that café in the corner, and Mary McCarthy is living on the third floor of that building at this very moment. The light in her office is on.
But for me, Paris has always been the city of Ernest Hemingway since I first read
A Moveable Feast
in my sophomore year at The Citadel. That book took me over like a fever. Hemingway captured all the romance and wistfulness of both the city and the writing life. He made me want to sit in Parisian cafés, smoking Gitanes, taking notes for stories in embryo, reading
Le Monde
while sipping a café au lait and thumbing through a paperback edition of
Madame Bovary
. Now that I had done all this I was getting ready to leave Paris, and the thought of it almost killed me, because I realized I had taken a great chance by following my editor and his wife on his sabbatical year to Europe. I could feel that I had changed my whole life because of it. After reading
A Moveable Feast
, I had promised myself that I would one day live and write in Paris, and I had kept that promise and come to the city with a spirit of adventure that is rare for me. But I had written the last chapter of
The Lords of Discipline
, and my remaining time in the city was short.
From the time of my arrival, I had made pilgrimages to the places and houses, parks and apartments that Hemingway mentioned in his book. John and Susan Galassi stayed at a charming hotel across the street from where Ernest and Hadley Hemingway had rented an apartment above a sawmill at 74 rue Cardinal Lemoine. I would wander for hours amid the prodigious human traffic that made its way down the rue Mouffetard to
the Place Contrescarpe, past booths overflowing with vegetables, groaning with massive white heads of cauliflower, rivers of mâche and asparagus and cabbages from the countryside. The
charcutier
with his trays of sausages and offal sang behind his counter as I passed live chickens in their boxes and the iced-down shrimp and oysters driven over from the coast. The strong smell of cheeses and the bakeries perfuming the streets with the brown aromas of croissants and pastries that made you salivate when you caught their sweet scents in the scrimmage of odors that fought for your attention as you made your way in crowds down that fine, unruly street.
I passed by the tobacconist and the man who sold horseflesh and the one who sold only artichokes and the onion lady who was just before the olive man whose whole existence centered on the presence of olives in France. I headed down the street slowly, Hemingway-besotted, as I tried to remember everything and everyone because the images of Paris would travel with me forever, wherever I went; the rue Mouffetard is carry-on luggage that will be available and on-call wherever I take pen to paper for the rest of my life.
As I write these words on Fripp Island, I realize that I am exactly Hemingway’s age when he first began to write
A Moveable Feast
at the Finca Vigia in Cuba in 1957. In his prose, I can feel the tenderness he had begun to feel for the fiery, virile young man he had once been, and the regret for things he had done and said. His love for his first wife, Hadley infuses the book, as does his pleasure in the company of his firstborn son, John, whom he nicknamed Bumby It is one of the great books ever written about a writer’s life and art. Its ardent sense of place still makes Paris seem like the most glamorous and enchanting place for a writer to be in the world.
I said goodbye to Paris slowly, and it took two weeks to pull it off. Again I went to all the places Hemingway mentions in
A Moveable Feast
. I drank a “black” wine from Cahors because he did, and I had a Rhum St. James at a café near Place St. Michel because Hemingway had done so. I lingered outside the sawmill on the night before I would leave Paris for a car trip to Rome with friends.